Author: Paul Paliath

Microsoft are currently running a promotion which all students who go to College in the United States can participate in, specifically those who are making apps for the Windows Phone platform, as den by default reports. To quote, here are the requirements to participate in the promotion:

You are a student in an accredited university/college in the United States

You have developed two Windows Phone applications that are (or will be) published between March 26th and May 31st, 2012.

Those apps are targeting Windows Phone 7.5

Apps support Fast App Switching

The apps are of high-quality and are not created with one of the “do-it-fast” tools, like AppMakr or FollowMyFeed

You have not received a Windows Phone device in previous student promotions from Microsoft

So, to enter, you need to create and publish two Windows Phone apps to the Marketplace anytime between March 26th and May 31st, and sign up on the Facebook page. So, if you’re a student who has been interested in getting your feet wet in Windows Phone development, this seems like a great time and incentive to get started!

Last week, Microsoft set up a teaser website dubbed the “Free-Time Machine”, with a tagline that suggested that all will be revealed on April 9th, the day that the Lumia 900 went live. And, as expected, Microsoft conducted the promotional event on Monday.

To commemorate the launch of two major Windows Phone devices — the Nokia Lumia 900, and the HTC Titan II — Microsoft set up “Free-Time Machine” booths in New York, San Francisco, and Chicago, in which you could win time-saving prizes such as free grocery deliveries, cleaning and dog-walking services, and personal concierges. Or a Windows Phone, which Microsoft touts as “the ultimate time-saving tool”.

On top of these prizes, a celebrity made an appearance in each city as well. Stephanie Izard, a celebrity chef showed up at the Chicago event, 49ers player Vernon Davis showed up at the San Francisco booth, and Kourtney Kardashian took New York and even subtly promoted the phone during an appearance on Fox News. On top of this physical promotion, you can also participate in the fun on the Free-Time Machine website, where you can win a trip to Hawaii, among other prizes.

Nevertheless, here are a few videos which provide a recap of each event in each city:

Late last month, HBO Go, MLB.TV, and Comcast Xfinity apps were launched on Xbox LIVE, making a wide array of additional TV content available on the platform to those with the appropriate subscriptions. However, on launch day, Comcast (and Time Warner) subscribers were unable to access the HBO Go content. While there’s no word on whether or not Time Warner users will ever be able to use HBO Go, the @Xbox account did tweet today that HBO Go is now available for Comcast Xfinity subscribers.

Now, one unfortunate thing about using the HBO Go app instead of the Xfinity app to view HBO content is that doing so will count towards your monthly broadband usage. The Xfinity app on the other hand is treated as another set-top box (without any accompanying fees, of course), and thus does not count towards data usage.

Both the Xfinity TV and HBO Go apps offer Kinect integrations. In the Xfinity app, you can use either voice control or your arms to navigate through the app. And in the HBO Go app, you can use your voicew to search through the catalogue of shows.

So, what are you waiting for? You can now watch Game of Thrones using either the Xfinity app or the HBO Go app, so get to watching!

“Email publishing” — a feature which allows you to publish photos directly to SkyDrive via email — will be discontinued after April 2012 according to an email sent out by Microsoft. The feature, which made its way into SkyDrive from the long-deceased service Windows Live Spaces (rest its soul) allows you to directly publish photos to SkyDrive via email.

Basically, you authorize up to three email addresses to send the photos from, and each SkyDrive album would be assigned an email address (in the [email protected]format.)

I don’t think that this feature would be too missed; until today, I had no idea about its existence at all. In lieu of the demise of email publishing, however, we can all look forward to the massive SkyDrive update which is set to roll out sometime soon. This update is set to introduce desktop clients for both Windows (on Windows 8, an awesome Metro SkyDrive app is available) and OS X, an increased upload size limit, paid storage capacity upgrades, offline functionality, and SkyDrive browsing of remote files, among other things. With Google Drive on the horizon, along with other existing cloud platforms (i.e Dropbox), it’s good to see SkyDrive keeping things competitive. And with the introduction of desktop functionality, it seems like the service may be a worthy competitor to iCloud in terms of an ecosystem cloud utility (let’s just hope for some awesome Windows Phone 8 integration.)

In order to meet the growing demand for Microsoft’s Azure cloud service, the company has announced the immediate availability of two additional US datacenters, both offering “compute” and “storage” resources. Aptly dubbed “East US” and “West US”, the specific locations and sizes of the datacenters were not revealed. However, ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley thinks that the east coast location may be in Southern Virginia — an already announced datacenter location — and the west coast location may be in West Des Moines, Iowa; which was previously picked as a datacenter location by Microsoft.

What about SQL Azure availability? The blog post mentioned that it’s set to be available on these datacenters sometime within the coming months. “These new options add to our worldwide presence and significantly expand our US footprint”, writes Cameron Rogers, who penned the announcement post on the Azure Team Blog. “As some eager customers have already discovered (and deployed!), these new datacenters are now visible in the Windows Azure Management Portal.”

Definitely cool to see that demand is there for Azure, at least in the US to justify two additional datacenters on top of the existing two (the other US datacenter locations are in Chicago and San Antonio.) Microsoft also has datacenters in Amsterdam, Dublin, Hong Kong, and Singapore. All Azure datacenters contain around 1800-2500 servers on average.

Windows Phone 8 is expected to be a pretty colossal update — so colossal, in fact, that some phone manufacturers are waiting until its release later this year before making serious flagship devices — however, there were two big questions surrounding its release. Will it work on older hardware, and will existing apps continue to work on the platform? While we still don’t know the answer to the first question, the latter was addressed by Microsoft in a blog post on Thursday. Yes, the rumors are true; existing apps will continue to work on Windows Phone 8.

On top of announcing this, the blog post also hinted at the demise of Silverlight as a development technology on Windows Phone. Microsoft’s Larry Lieberman, who penned the post, addressed the topic of Silverlight concerns by suggesting other great technologies to use when developing for Windows Phone:

We’ve also heard some developers express concern about the long term future of Silverlight for Windows Phone. Please don’t panic; XAML and C#/VB.NET development in Windows 8 can be viewed as a direct evolution from today’s Silverlight. All of your managed programming skills are transferable to building applications for Windows 8, and in many cases, much of your code will be transferable as well.

According to a study conducted by New Relic which measures browser speeds on both mobile and desktop platforms, Internet Explorer 9 takes the cake for the fastest browsing experience on Windows with load times of around 3 seconds, while Firefox 14.0 and Chrome 17 tied at 3.5. Safari for Windows 5.1 took 4 seconds to load the same page.

On the Mac side, Chrome is the winner with Chrome 13 reporting load times of 2.4. Chrome 19 on the other time has load times of around 2.7, tying it with Safari 5.1. In the survey, a total of 7 Chrome versions were tested. Firefox 11 for Mac took 2.8 seconds.

The mobile browser speed results are quite interesting. Apparently, Blackberries are in fact good for one thing; BlackBerry Opera Mini 6.5 took around 2.6 seconds to load pages, compared to Safari (iPad) 5.1’s load time of 5 seconds, and Safari (iPhone) 5.0’s load time of 6.2 seconds. The load time for Safari (iPhone) 5.1 was around 6.6 seconds. Opera Mobile 12 for Android’s load time was around 7.3 seconds.

The study was conducted in March 2012 over the course of one week, in which New Relic surveyed and measured the speed of 5 billion global page loads across PC and mobile browsers.

In conclusion, here’s a statistical tidbit: This year’s average page load is 5.5 seconds, compared to last year’s time of 6 seconds.

At the end of February — buried under all of the Windows 8 and Mobile World Congress news — Microsoft released free PC flight simulator Microsoft Flight. And now, Neowin reports that it has hit the popular Steam digital game marketplace with all of its paid DLC content.

You can grab the game for no charge, of course, but the three DLC packs — the first being a P-51 Mustang for $7.99, the second being a Maule M-7-260C for $14.99, and the third a new Hawaiian-based campaign for $19.99 — do cost money. While Microsoft Flight is free-to-play, you will have to pay for planes and other stuff that keeps the game fresh and fun. If you want to purchase it all, then there’s also a Steam bundle for $29.99 which includes all three packs.

So, diehard Flight Simulator fans, is this worth checking out? Definitely, but don’t get ready to shelve your current copy of Flight Simulator X just yet. While it’s a fun, free-to-play game, it doesn’t come anywhere close to the realistic experience offered by the FS titles. Also, on top of the lacking realism, it has more of an arcade-y feel to the entire game to appeal to the casual masses (over those who prefer more hard core flight simulators.)

On Tuesday, Microsoft pushed out an update for the Windows Phone 7 Connector for Mac. Allowing users to sync music, movies, TV shows, and podcasts from iTunes to Windows Phone, sync photos and videos to and from iPhoto, browse media items stored on your device, and update your device, the connector is pretty much a must-have for Mac-owning Windows Phone users.

The changelog, as follows is exactly the same as it was for the 2.01 release. That being said, WPCentral notes that reliability and performance improvements were made under-the-hood:

On Monday, Skype kicked off a new $12 million dollar ad campaign in the United States and United Kingdom which knocks Twitter and Facebook as methods of communication, touting Skype as a far better alternative. “140 characters doesn’t equal staying in touch” is one of the lines that the campaign will use to outline the differences between Skype and the two major social networks.

“A lot of people have great stories to tell about using Skype with friends and family, but they often see us as a one-dimensional product,” said Francie Strong, a Skype marketing director. “We’re proud of our video calls, but we also want them to know about our other products: screen-sharing, group video, file transfer, instant messaging, calls to mobile and landlines. The combination of features allows a more natural conversation.”

I’ve always been curious about how normal people use Skype. I think that describing it as a one-dimensional product is quite fitting; Skype is often used just for talking to family and friends who are far away occasionally, and this is what it’s notorious for. So, in that sense, spreading the word about some of Skype’s other features definitely sounds like a good idea. But is this the right way to go about it?

The campaign is admittedly provocative, with Strong stating that “The focus is on big, bold statements to grab people’s attention and get them to think about how they communicate.” Justin Cox of Pereira & O’Dell — the agency which has developed this campaign for Skype — did note that this is more than just a provocative, attention-grabbing campaign:

“It was depressing and inspiring. It’s rare that a campaign gives you the opportunity to address very relevant, timely cultural issues. Skype isn’t solving the world’s problems, but it has a point of view. This is more than just a marketing message with provocative headlines — our message is to help people truly connect in a genuine way.”

Recently, I’ve been mulling over how most people use Skype. I consider myself a heavy user of everything but video calls; I use Skype very heavily for voice calls,, and, consequently, its instant messaging and file transfer functionality (to share links and other content with the entire group in the call). I also occasionally use screen-sharing and mobile/landline calling (I have a subscription). Most of the group voice calls are several hours long (and yes, they’re largely productive.)

So, as someone who uses Skype like that, it’s hard to imagine that some only use the service very lightly. As for the campaign? In terms of pointing out the communication benefits of making a Skype call over text communication via Facebook and Twitter, then sure, it’s a great campaign. But it shouldn’t come off as an attack; Skype is fundamentally different from Facebook and Twitter, and the marketing team needs to portray this without coming off as suggesting that Skype should be used instead of other services.

Of course, this isn’t the intended message from the marketing department, but some may wrongly infer this from the provocative taglines.